Are you looking for new ways to brainstorm blog topics? If so, you’re not alone. Business owners, marketers, and bloggers understand that content marketing is the best way to build rapport with their audience and secure more sales.
As you add more content to your blog, you’ll eventually hit a point where you have to ask yourself, “what on earth am I going to write about next?” This is a common phenomenon, especially with full-time content writers who publish 5+ posts every week.
If you’re feeling unsure and don’t know what to cover next, we are here to help. There are plenty of clever ways you can come up with new blog post ideas. Today, we want to show you some of our favorite tips and tricks for getting our creative juices flowing when it’s time to start writing.
Ready? Let’s get started!
Use Google’s Autocomplete Feature
Google is one of the best ways to develop new blog ideas. Believe it or not, 86% of all website traffic goes through Google. In other words, when someone has a question, wants to buy a product, or wishes to learn more about an industry, they use Google.
You can use this knowledge to come up with powerful topics for your blog. We’ve had tremendous success using Google’s autocomplete feature when brainstorming.
When you go to the Google Search homepage, start typing in your keyword and look at the suggested searches. For instance:
If you’re a content writer for an email marketing software company, you probably just got a ton of new ideas for your blog. At a glance, you could;
- Review of your product
- Create a side-by-side comparison with a competitor
- Publish a comprehensive guide of email marketing tips for eCommerce businesses
- Interview other industry experts on their market/trend predictions
- Cover your most popular product integrations
When you consider that this is based on one quick search, it’s easy to see why Google’s autocomplete feature is so helpful for content writers. The best part is the suggested terms are based on popular search trends, so you can bet that these topics will resonate with your audience.
Ask Your Audience for Feedback
Your audience can also help you come up with ideas for new blog posts. There are quite a few ways to find out what both casual visitors and existing customers think of your content. You can use this knowledge to improve your content marketing strategy and connect with new visitors and die-hard fans of your brand.
One way to find out what your audience thinks is to simply ask. We regularly send surveys to our email marketing subscribers and include customer feedback forms on our site. If someone is interested in a specific topic not included on your blog, you may have just found a winning topic idea.
Let’s go back to our previous example. Suppose an email marketing SaaS sent a survey to their subscribers, and most customers asked for advice on growing their lead list on social media. In that case, they can easily turn this information into several new blog posts. Because people are already showing interest in this topic, there’s a good chance these same people will come back to read your new article.
You can also gather plenty of valuable audience insights on social media. The average social media user spends 2 hours and 22 minutes on their preferred networks every single day. If you can reach your target customers through your posts, advertisements, social listening tools, and collaborations, you can learn more about what your visitors want to see, which is an excellent resource for brainstorming content ideas.
Take Advantage of Free Brainstorming Tools
There are plenty of excellent brainstorming tools you can use to discover new topics for your website. We have a list of favorites that we use when it’s time to buckle down and create our editorial calendar for the quarter.
AnswerThePublic is an excellent free resource for coming up with hundreds of potential ideas in seconds. Once you navigate to their homepage, you can type in a string of keywords and see an organized list of ideas.
Here are the results for “email marketing”:
As you can see, they organize the generated topic ideas alphabetically, but there are plenty of other ways to view this data. The words “email marketing” led to 25 potential topic ideas, and that’s just using the first three letters of the alphabet!
We also suggest using a headline analyzer tool to fine-tune your topic ideas into engaging, clickable posts. There are plenty of free options available that can help you improve how you structure your topic ideas. Here’s an example from the analyzer we use:
There’s more to it than what you see here. But at a glance, it’s evident that this tool can help you gradually improve the quality of your headlines, which can lead to more sales, traffic, and subscribers.
Review Your Analytics
Finally, let’s talk about how reviewing your Google Analytics data can help you write better blog posts. Depending on the tool you use, it’s posible to dive deep into your website’s analytics and discover how people engage with your brand.
We like looking at our most popular posts so we can learn about the topics that appeal to our audience. When you consider that 47% of shoppers read 3-5 blog posts before completing a purchase, it’s easy to see how this type of analysis can help you skyrocket traffic and conversions.
So, if your blog has 8 subtopics and 2 get significantly more traffic and engagement than the rest, they are likely good core ideas for your next post. The more you learn about your customers, the easier time you’ll have to make these types of decisions.
We also suggest looking at how people are finding your website. If a majority of your customers are coming from a site that talks about a sub-set of your industry, you can assume that more content on this sub-topic would lead to more traffic.
Final Thoughts
Brainstorming topic ideas for your blog can be time-consuming, but it’s crucial to your success. If your topics are boring, the content within the article will also suffer. It’s also worth pointing out that publishing content that doesn’t resonate with your audience will lead to a drop in traffic.
The tips offered here today will hopefully help the next time you’re stuck and don’t know what to write next. We’ve used these strategies for years and continue to see success with our content marketing strategy and audience engagement.
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